John Lukacs - Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past

The Remembered Past

John Lukacs

With a new introduction by the author
and a foreword by Russell Kirk

First published 1994 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

New material this edition copyright 1994 by Taylor & Francis. 1968 and 1985 edition copyright John Lukacs

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 93-48925

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lukacs, John, 1924-

[Historical consciousness, or, The remembered past]

Historical consciousness: the remembered past / John Lukacs; with a new introduction by the author and a foreword by Russell Kirk.

p. cm.(The Library of conservative thought)

Previously published: Historical consciousness, or, The remebered past. Rev. and enl. ed. New York: Schocken Books, 1985.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-56000-732-X (pbk.)

1. HistoryPhilosophy. I. Series.

D16.9.L83 1994

901dc20

93-48925

CIP

ISBN 13: 978-1-56000-732-6 (pbk)

Americas British Culture, Kirk

Authority and the Liberal Tradition, Heineman

A Better Guide Than Reason, Bradford

Burke Street, Scott-Moncrieff

The Case for Conservatism, Wilson

Cline, Hindus

Character and Culture, Babbitt

Collected Letters of John Randolph to John Brockenbrough, Shorey

Congress and the American Tradition, Burnham

Conservatism: Dream and Reality, Nisbet

A Critical Examination of Socialism, Mallock

Edmund Burke: Appraisals & Applications, Ritchie

Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment & Revolution, Stanlis

The Essential Calhoun, Wilson

The Foundations of Political Science, Burgess

Ghosts on the Roof Chambers

The God of the Machine, Paterson

A Historian and His World, Scott

Historical Consciousness, Lukacs

Chose Freedom, Kravchenko

I Chose Justice, Kravchenko

Irving Babbitt, Literature, and the Democratic Culture, Hindus

The Jewish East Side 1881-1924, Hindus

Law Without Force, Niemeyer

Lord George Bentinck, Disraeli

The Moral Foundations of Civil Society, Roepke

Moral Phenomena, Hartmann

Moral Values, Hartmann

Natural Law, dEntreves

On Divorce, de Bonald

Orestes Brownson, Kirk

The Phantom Public, Lippmann

Collected Essays, Wilson

Politics of the Center, Starzinger

Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States, Davidson

Rousseau and Romanticism, Babbitt

The Social Crisis of Our Time, Roepke

Tensions of Order and Freedom, Menczer

The Vision of Richard Weaver, Scotchie

The Voegelinian Revolution, Sandoz

We the People, McDonald

This is the third, and most complete, edition of Historical Consciousness, for which opportunity provided by Transaction Publishers I am very grateful. I have had many inquiries about this bookoddly enough, especially during the last few years, that is, nearly a quarter-century after its original publication in 1968, which has long gone out of printas has its second edition, published in 1985. All of these inquiries question me not about the contents of the book but about its availability. Now Historical Consciousness will be available again, and I must advise its present and future readers about the contents of its successive editions, including the present volume.

The original edition of Historical Consciousness, in 1968, had no introduction, plunging in medias res on page 1 (which, I now know, may have been a mistake). It had, however, a postscript (pages 315-23), summing up the history of the composition of the book itself, in accord with my beliefand, perhaps, with a main argument of the bookthat the history of everything amounts to the thing itself. When, in 1985, Schocken Books published a new, paperbound edition, I found it necessary to make two substantial additions amounting to fifty-four pages. The Introduction, or the state of historical knowledge (1985), pages xxiii-xlii, and another new chapter, VDI: Conclusion, or participant historical knowledge, pages 324-59, are a summation of many of my ideas, and conclusions which crystallized, or matured, during the seventeen years between the two editions. Otherwise the 1985 edition remained identical to the original 1968 one, save for the corrections of a handful of minor typographical or other errata, for four minor addenda (on pages 288, 304, 314) and for what I consider a significant (and perhaps amusing) Addendum on page 315. Howeverfor technical reasonsthe original Idearium and Index of Names remained unchanged, and thus incomplete as well as partially incorrect. In the present Transaction edition these have been corrected.

Historical Consciousness, to me, remains the most important of my seventeen or eighteen books. It would be presumptuous to expatiate on this, except to state that the philosophy, the structure, and the contents of each of my, often very different, books and articles, reflect many of the recognitions and the practices of historical thinking and research and writing that I attempt to set fourth in Historical Consciousness. Between the 1985 and the present edition I wrote, and had published, four different books, among them what I call an auto-history, Confessions of an Original Sinner (1990), in which Chapter 7, Writing, contains some of my recollections about my working on Historical Consciousness. Now, at the age of seventy, I am aware of a few youthful enthusiasms and possible excrescences appearing, here and there, in the pages of the original edition; but I have thought it better to leave the original text as it isnot because of wisdom, but not because of lassitude either.